I am really impressed by my first look at s3ql. A really complete, just working and well documented tool to mount aws s3 and other cloud storage solution on a dedicated server:

S3QL is a file system that stores all its data online using storage services like Google Storage, Amazon S3 or OpenStack. S3QL effectively provides a hard disk of dynamic, infinite capacity that can be accessed from any computer with internet access running Linux, FreeBSD or OS-X.

S3QL is a standard conforming, full featured UNIX file system that is conceptually indistinguishable from any local file system. Furthermore, S3QL has additional features like compression, encryption, data de-duplication, immutable trees and snapshotting which make it especially suitable for online backup and archival.

S3QL is designed to favor simplicity and elegance over performance and feature-creep. Care has been taken to make the source code as readable and serviceable as possible. Solid error detection and error handling have been included from the very first line, and S3QL comes with extensive automated test cases for all its components.

Features

Transparency. Conceptually, S3QL is indistinguishable from a local file system. For example, it supports hardlinks, symlinks, ACLs and standard unix permissions, extended attributes and file sizes up to 2 TB.

Dynamic Size. The size of an S3QL file system grows and shrinks dynamically as required.

Compression. Before storage, all data may compressed with the LZMA, bzip2 or deflate (gzip) algorithm.

Encryption. After compression (but before upload), all data can AES encrypted with a 256 bit key. An additional SHA256 HMAC checksum is used to protect the data against manipulation.

Data De-duplication. If several files have identical contents, the redundant data will be stored only once. This works across all files stored in the file system, and also if only some parts of the files are identical while other parts differ.

Immutable Trees. Directory trees can be made immutable, so that their contents can no longer be changed in any way whatsoever. This can be used to ensure that backups can not be modified after they have been made.

Copy-on-Write/Snapshotting. S3QL can replicate entire directory trees without using any additional storage space. Only if one of the copies is modified, the part of the data that has been modified will take up additional storage space. This can be used to create intelligent snapshots that preserve the state of a directory at different points in time using a minimum amount of space.

High Performance independent of network latency. All operations that do not write or read file contents (like creating directories or moving, renaming, and changing permissions of files and directories) are very fast because they are carried out without any network transactions. S3QL achieves this by saving the entire file and directory structure in a database. This database is locally cached and the remote copy updated asynchronously.

Support for low bandwidth connections. S3QL splits file contents into smaller blocks and caches blocks locally. This minimizes both the number of network transactions required for reading and writing data, and the amount of data that has to be transferred when only parts of a file are read or written.

First exercise your disk with your own code or with a simple write operation like writing files should be enough to test network saturation. When profiling reads instead of writes, call umount and mount to flush caches, or the read will seem instantaneous:

The first number is the number of threads available for servicing requests, and the the second number is the number of times that all threads have been needed. The remaining 10 numbers are a histogram showing how many seconds a certain fraction of the threads have been busy, starting with less than 10% of the threads and ending with more than 90% of the threads. If the last few numbers have accumulated a significant amount of time, then your server probably needs more threads.
Increase the number of threads used by the server to 16 by changing RPCNFSDCOUNT=16 in /etc/rc.d/init.d/nfs

Invisible or stale files

If separate clients are sharing information through NFS disks, then you have special problems. You may delete a file on one client node and cause a different client to get a stale file handle. Different clients may have cached inconsistent versions of the same file. A single client may even create a file or directory and be unable to see it immediately. If these problems sound familiar, then you may want to adjust NFS caching parameters and code multiple attempts in your applications.

Introduction

In this tutorial we will set up a highly available server providing NFS services to clients. Should a server become unavailable, services provided by our cluster will continue to be available to users.

A curious software bug which caused a two day outrage of Windows Azur:

Introduction

As a follow-up to my March 1 posting, I want to share the findings of our root cause analysis of the service disruption of February 29th. We know that many of our customers were impacted by this event and we want to be transparent about what happened, what issues we found, how we plan to address these issues, and how we are learning from the incident to prevent a similar occurrence in the future.

Again, we sincerely apologize for the disruption, downtime and inconvenience this incident has caused. We will be proactively issuing a service credit to our impacted customers as explained below. Rest assured that we are already hard at work using our learnings to improve Windows Azure.

Overview of Windows Azure and the Service Disruption

Windows Azure comprises many different services, including Compute, Storage, Networking and higher-level services like Service Bus and SQL Azure. This partial service outage impacted Windows Azure Compute and dependent services: Access Control Service (ACS), Windows Azure Service Bus, SQL Azure Portal, and Data Sync Services. It did not impact Windows Azure Storage or SQL Azure.

While the trigger for this incident was a specific software bug, Windows Azure consists of many components and there were other interactions with normal operations that complicated this disruption. There were two phases to this incident. The first phase was focused on the detection, response and fix of the initial software bug. The second phase was focused on the handful of clusters that were impacted due to unanticipated interactions with our normal servicing operations that were underway. Understanding the technical details of the issue requires some background on the functioning of some of the low-level Windows Azure components.

Fabric Controllers, Agents and Certificates

In Windows Azure, cloud applications consist of virtual machines running on physical servers in Microsoft datacenters. Servers are grouped into “clusters” of about 1000 that are each independently managed by a scaled-out and redundant platform software component called the Fabric Controller (FC), as depicted in Figure 1. Each FC manages the lifecycle of applications running in its cluster, provisions and monitors the health of the hardware under its control. It executes both autonomic operations, like reincarnating virtual machine instances on healthy servers when it determines that a server has failed, as well as application-management operations like deploying, updating and scaling out applications. Dividing the datacenter into clusters isolates faults at the FC level, preventing certain classes of errors from affecting servers beyond the cluster in which they occur.

Figure 1. Clusters and Fabric Controllers

Part of Windows Azure’s Platform as a Service (PaaS) functionality requires its tight integration with applications that run in VMs through the use of a “guest agent” (GA) that it deploys into the OS image used by the VMs, shown in Figure 2. Each server has a “host agent” (HA) that the FC leverages to deploy application secrets, like SSL certificates that an application includes in its package for securing HTTPS endpoints, as well as to “heart beat” with the GA to determine whether the VM is healthy or if the FC should take recovery actions.

Figure 2. Host Agent and Guest Agent Initialization

So that the application secrets, like certificates, are always encrypted when transmitted over the physical or logical networks, the GA creates a “transfer certificate” when it initializes. The first step the GA takes during the setup of its connection with the HA is to pass the HA the public key version of the transfer certificate. The HA can then encrypt secrets and because only the GA has the private key, only the GA in the target VM can decrypt those secrets.

There are several cases that require generation of a new transfer certificate. Most of the time that’s only when a new VM is created, which occurs when a user launches a new deployment, when a deployment scales out, or when a deployment updates its VM operating system. The fourth case is when the FC reincarnates a VM that was running on a server it has deemed unhealthy to a different server, a process the platform calls “service healing.”

The Leap Day Bug

When the GA creates the transfer certificate, it gives it a one year validity range. It uses midnight UST of the current day as the valid-from date and one year from that date as the valid-to date. The leap day bug is that the GA calculated the valid-to date by simply taking the current date and adding one to its year. That meant that any GA that tried to create a transfer certificate on leap day set a valid-to date of February 29, 2013, an invalid date that caused the certificate creation to fail.

As mentioned, transfer certificate creation is the first step of the GA initialization and is required before it will connect to the HA. When a GA fails to create its certificates, it terminates. The HA has a 25-minute timeout for hearing from the GA. When a GA doesn’t connect within that timeout, the HA reinitializes the VM’s OS and restarts it.

If a clean VM (one in which no customer code has executed) times out its GA connection three times in a row, the HA decides that a hardware problem must be the cause since the GA would otherwise have reported an error. The HA then reports to the FC that the server is faulty and the FC moves it to a state called Human Investigate (HI). As part of its standard autonomic failure recovery operations for a server in the HI state, the FC will service heal any VMs that were assigned to the failed server by reincarnating them to other servers. In a case like this, when the VMs are moved to available servers the leap day bug will reproduce during GA initialization, resulting in a cascade of servers that move to HI.

To prevent a cascading software bug from causing the outage of an entire cluster, the FC has an HI threshold, that when hit, essentially moves the whole cluster to a similar HI state. At that point the FC stops all internally initiated software updates and automatic service healing is disabled. This state, while degraded, gives operators the opportunity to take control and repair the problem before it progresses further.

The Leap Day Bug in Action

The leap day bug immediately triggered at 4:00PM PST, February 28th (00:00 UST February 29th) when GAs in new VMs tried to generate certificates. Storage clusters were not affected because they don’t run with a GA, but normal application deployment, scale-out and service healing would have resulted in new VM creation. At the same time many clusters were also in the midst of the rollout of a new version of the FC, HA and GA. That ensured that the bug would be hit immediately in those clusters and the server HI threshold hit precisely 75 minutes (3 times 25 minute timeout) later at 5:15PM PST. The bug worked its way more slowly through clusters that were not being updated, but the critical alarms on the updating clusters automatically stopped the updates and alerted operations staff to the problem. They in turn notified on-call FC developers, who researched the cause and at 6:38PM PST our developers identified the bug.

By this time some applications had single VMs offline and some also had multiple VMs offline, but most applications with multiple VMs maintained availability, albeit with some reduced capacity. To prevent customers from inadvertently causing further impact to their running applications, unsuccessfully scaling-out their applications, and fruitlessly trying to deploy new applications, we disabled service management functionality in all clusters worldwide at 6:55PM PST. This is the first time we’ve ever taken this step. Service management allows customers to deploy, update, stop and scale their applications but isn’t necessary for the continued operation of already deployed applications. However stopping service management prevents customers from modifying or updating their currently deployed applications.

We created a test and rollout plan for the updated GA by approximately 10:00PM PST, had the updated GA code ready at 11:20PM PST, and finished testing it in a test cluster at 1:50AM PST, February 29th. In parallel, we successfully tested the fix in production clusters on the VMs of several of our own applications. We next initiated rollout of the GA to one production cluster and that completed successfully at 2:11AM PST, at which time we pushed the fix to all clusters. As clusters were updated we restored service management functionality for them and at 5:23AM PST we announced service management had been restored to the majority of our clusters.